Fuente: Forbes.com
Autor: Richard Kestenbaum
We describe what children do as “play.” To adults that means something other than work but for children, playing is their job, it's how they learn to socialize and think constructively. Unlike adult work, if it's not constantly engaging, they stop and then it’s not productive. So making toys that interest children and help them develop at the same time is the toy industry’s ongoing challenge. David Scher, a serially successful toy industry veteran told me at Toy Fair, “The lifeblood of the toy business is new and innovative products. This has gotten much harder and more expensive. But without it, the toy business goes away.”
In the last several years, many schools have decreased recess and free time. That’s a challenge for the toy industry because it decreases the focus on play time for children as they grow. The industry's response continues to evolve based on parents’ own experiences, tastes and goals. Developing toys that help children become adults in the right way will continue to be the industry’s challenge.
The toy industry is notoriously fickle and subject to rapid change. Each year, different trends are responsible for huge swings in success and failure. The industry recently had its biggest gathering of the year, Toy Fair in New York, and that's where all the trends in the industry can be observed. I spoke with a number of people about what will take off in 2019, including Ken Seiter, EVP of the Toy Association, and these are the leading trends for 2019:
Unboxing
Unboxing is a fancy way of saying “taking stuff out of the box.” But it is also consistent with the overall consumer trend favoring experiences rather than products. Like the old-fashioned Russian nesting dolls, where a smaller doll of the same type is inside each outer doll, it's the experience of opening the product that is the most important part of having it and playing with it. That’s what unboxing is about. It makes the packaging and the product into one coherent, unified experience.
Influencers
Marketing of toys is changing rapidly as influencers have come to the toy business and they are having a big impact. The most important is Ryan’s World which has over 18 million subscribers on YouTube and has had over 30 billion video views.